On my twenty-first birthday, still drunk from a whole weekend of partying, I found myself on a train home. Our house was near the station and I’d slept on the train, and what on earth I thought I was doing I honestly had no idea. It was mid-morning and on a normal day my dad would have been at work. Except he’d been off for a month with depression, something my mam hadn’t told me. And I turned my key in the lock and walked into the living room, expecting Mam to make me a cuppa and present me with a cake she would have made even though she wasn’t expecting me to visit, but she wasn’t there. Just him. And he was watching the twenty-four-hour news channel, looking up from it to see me in his living room, his third daughter if he’d only realised, but I was still Edward then – and I was wearing a short skirt and platform heels to go with it. He looked me up and down, his mouth open. And the shock of seeing him drowned me like a cold bath and all I could think to say was, ‘Hello, Dad.’
He let out a howl of rage and distress, got up from the sofa and launched himself at me. I exited the house as quickly as I’d arrived, tottering up the street back towards the station thinking that he was following me and any minute now he’d strike my head with a massive blow. And when I got to the end of the street I looked back and he was nowhere to be seen.
When I got back to London I phoned Mam. She was home from work by then and had found him. He was alright, she assured me. But of course he wasn’t. She tried to shield me from all that, but he hanged himself a week later. It wasn’t just down to me, of course, or at least that’s what my mam insisted. Maybe she was being kind.
She asked me to wear ‘something decent’ for the funeral. That hurt me a lot. I felt it acutely, the loss of my dad whom I loved very much. The falseness of my mam’s approval of who I was was just another sting. My sisters turned against me then, even though they’d known about me changing and both of them had visited me in London and seen the real me. I wore a tailored trouser suit to the funeral and had my hair done for it. It wasn’t my usual look, it was a compromise, but they still didn’t recognise it as such.
They never spoke to me again, and I barely spoke to my mam afterwards, either. With my share of the inheritance I got the deposit for a house not far from the one we all grew up in. I wanted to feel close to what was left of my dad, who would have been a different man if he’d grown up a generation later, and close to my mam who was ailing now without anyone left to look after. I wanted to help her but we couldn’t be close again, not after all that.
I thought I was starting to recover from it, I thought I was getting my head back above water, but I had a letter from the NHS to say that they would no longer consider funding my surgery because they were aware that I had the private finance to do it. I didn’t, of course; I’d spent it on buying the little house. I tried to put the house on the market but by then the bottom had crashed out of it and there were no buyers around. I asked my eldest sister for help but she put the phone down on me, and when I went round there she didn’t answer the door, despite the car being on the driveway and the fact that I could hear her kids playing in the back garden.
I didn’t realise how easy the solution was, not really. Not until someone showed me. All you have to do is go home and close the door. For some people it’s harder – they have to plan, they have to do it gradually. I’d done the hard work all by myself, it was only the little nudge, the little whisper that made me realise the easiest thing to do was to cease to be.
So I went home, and I closed the door, and waited for the black cloud to carry the sun away.
‘Drink this,’ he said.
I opened my mouth and tried to reach for the cup – glass – to hold it but he held on to it and it bumped against my lower lip and teeth.
‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Drink.’
It was cold and it made me cough. When I’d stopped coughing I opened my eyes and looked and he held up the glass again and this time I drank, two or three gulps, cold water going down my throat. It tasted wrong, made me feel sick.
‘Do you recognise me, Annabel?’ he asked.
I stared at the face for a moment. There was a name that went with it but I couldn’t remember. It was as though the name had been wiped away.
‘It’s Sam. Sam Everett. Do you remember we met a few times?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘It will be alright,’ he said. His voice sounded wrong to me: annoying, discordant, a buzzing – like a fly, or a wasp, somewhere in the room. ‘You’ll be fine, I promise. I’m going to look after you.’
‘Go away,’ I said.
‘I’m not going,’ he said. He sounded sad. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ He held the glass up to my lips again but I turned my head. It wasn’t the thing to do any more. I wasn’t supposed to do this. ‘Don’t go to sleep, Annabel,’ he said. ‘Stay with me. Stay awake.’
My eyes were closing. I was tired, and I had to wait until six o’clock.
I rang Vaughn at eleven o’clock today to ask if he fancied a pint. It feels like a long time since I last saw him – in fact, the last time was when he was scooting out of the pub in search of an engagement ring for Audrey, a whole week ago.
‘Colin,’ he said cheerfully, when I rang. ‘What’s this number, then? Your happy little face didn’t come up in the caller display.’
I had to think about that for a second, and then I realised my mistake. ‘Oh, I’m ringing you from the work mobile. Does it matter? It’s still me.’
‘Shall I save it in my contacts this time?’ he asked. ‘I don’t always answer if I don’t recognise the number. I told you that before, remember.’
‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘It’ll probably be a different one next week. They’re supposed to be upgrading them all.’
That seemed to pacify him, anyway. I forgot I’d called him from the wrong phone once before and he’d got all shirty about it.
If I’d hoped that a pint and sandwich with Vaughn would lighten my mood, I would have been sadly disappointed. There’s nothing cheering about the place itself, with its brown carpet and wobbly bar stools; nothing to lift the spirits either in Vaughn’s countenance or behaviour. He seems almost as miserable as I am.
‘How’s Audrey?’ I ask, when I’ve ordered my sandwich and sat down opposite him.
‘She said no,’ he says dismally.
‘No? Really? Why?’
‘Said she’s not ready to settle down.’
‘I thought you said she’d been giving off hints.’
‘Well, that’s what I thought. But turns out I was way off the mark.’
I take a long gulp of the pint of bitter. It tastes faintly, ever so slightly, off. ‘What do you mean? What does she want?’
Vaughn sighs heavily. ‘You tell me, Colin. I’ve given up trying to make sense of what women want or expect from us.’
‘So,’ I say, trying to choose my words carefully and still probably failing, ‘she’s dumped you?’
He looks aghast. ‘No, nothing like that!’
‘Well, what, then?’
‘She just doesn’t want to be engaged, that’s all.’
I make a noise that tries to express sympathy for Vaughn, disgust at Audrey and relief that they are still in some kind of relationship. It comes out as a ‘Hmmm. Pfft.’
‘This pint’s off,’ I say after a while, and go to tell them to change the barrel.
Vaughn’s problems are tiny, pale and uninteresting in comparison to mine, like the runt of a particularly average litter. I’ve lost one of my subjects – the woman with the satchel. That hasn’t happened to me for a long time, since I became choosier about which subjects to engage with.
I called her at six last night, as arranged, and the phone went unanswered. I wondered if she had already expired and begun to transform – but that would have been very quick, even without water. When I drove past the house on my way home, there was an ambulance and a police car parked outside.
However much I try to kid myself that I’m not bothered, I am still pissed off at my own negligence. I’ve failed her, but, more importantly, I’ve failed myself; and losing one when the police are already showing an interest in my activities is a big risk.
I lost others, particularly in the beginning. Ones that were unsure, or maybe were less isolated than they first appeared. I thought that sooner or later someone – a family member, perhaps – would put in a complaint about me, or alert the authorities, but nobody ever contacted me with regard to this. As I refined my technique I took steps to guard against discovery. Taking their mobile phones away and leaving them with a replacement for me to keep in touch with them was one particularly genius idea. On more than one occasion I have sent reassuring replies to texts from people who seem a little concerned, and once or twice I have given up on people and not returned to them at all in case they are found.
Each loss is a shame. Some of them were really interesting, too: ones whose transformation I had been looking forward to very much.
All day today I have been trying to reassure myself that they have no way of connecting me with her. And if they do, what of it? I spoke to her. She invited me into her house. She asked me for help, and I provided it. I have done nothing wrong.
Sitting beside the morose Vaughn, I can’t help feeling a shiver of arousal at the thought of Audrey’s rejection of him. And it is a rejection, no matter what spin he thinks to put upon it. She is not ready to commit to him, which means she might consider playing with someone else. She might consider me…
‘Do you want me to have a word with her?’ I ask.
Vaughn looks up from his food. I can always tell when he is miserable because he chooses a sausage and egg baguette instead of a ham salad. This makes for a noxious concoction of brown sauce, ketchup and egg yolk which invariably dribbles down his chin (where it will be wiped) or down his sad brown tie (where it will remain).
‘Really?’ he says, or that’s what it sounds like through a mouthful of partially masticated meat-and-dough.
I give him a disgusted look which I hope he takes on board. ‘If it might help,’ I say. ‘You never know.’
His eyebrows furrow. It looks like confusion to me, but I can never quite work this out. Suspicion. Maybe it’s suspicion.
‘Or – not. It was just a thought.’
He swallows the last of the mouthful and sups some of his pint. Then he clears his throat. ‘It’s a very kind offer, Colin. Thank you. But…’
‘But?’
‘Well – it’s just that Audrey… she’s not very – I don’t know – comfortable with you.’
‘Comfortable?’ Much as it galls me to find myself repeating everything Vaughn says to me, I can think of no better response.
‘After the dinner party. She said you were a bit strange. Anyway, sorry. I don’t think you’ll be able to help. Not this time.’
‘Strange? What on earth…’ I look at Vaughn and then at the remains of my sandwich, suddenly unappetising and stale. But strange could be a good thing, couldn’t it? Maybe she meant strange as in unusual – enigmatic – mysterious.
‘I think it was just that evening,’ Vaughn says quickly, apparently anxious to avoid offence. ‘She was in a funny mood even before you arrived. Hormones, probably.’
I nod and murmur something to indicate assent, but inside I feel my blood churning in my ears. When I leave the pub and go back to the office, I cannot concentrate on anything. I feel the weight of it, the sudden desire to find Audrey and talk to her and ask her what she meant by the word ‘strange’. Even Garth and his disgusting ruminatory noises do not distract me. I work on a document for a committee meeting next Monday but Audrey does not leave me, not for a second.
In the hospital they put me on a drip and made me see a psychiatrist who prescribed me anti-depressants. The psychiatrist told me I’d experienced some kind of ‘episode’, which in years gone by might have been described as a breakdown. He said I had been through a lot of stress and I had not been able to process it, so my mind had shut down for reasons of self-preservation.
It all sounded plausible, but there were things about it that felt wrong. My memory of the week before was not just hazy but downright incorrect. It felt as though things had happened which were not available for me to consider. Part of me was desperate to get back home and shut the door and forget all about it, to go back to being on my own, at peace with everything.
When I said this to a nurse it prompted another visit from the psychiatrist, who asked me in a roundabout way, and then more directly, if I felt suicidal. He’d asked me this before, along with a whole load of other questions that I’d tried my best to answer.
‘Not really,’ was my response.
‘Do you feel like it sometimes?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Suicide was an active thing, a doing thing; it would require me to launch into a process that involved activity. No: what I wanted was the absence of activity. I wanted to cease. I wanted to lie still and let the world carry on. Nobody said the word DEATH but it was in my head. It was the same thing as LIFE. For some reason, they were the same thing, linked by an invisible band, the end and the beginning and the end, an endless circle going round and round, a wheel. If I was not afraid of life, then I was not afraid of death. They were the same.
I think they had been on the verge of discharging me at that point, but instead they moved me from a medical ward to a psychiatric ward.
You want to know how it all started, don’t you? You want to hear how I went from a mind-numbing adult education course in how to make friends and influence people, to steering strangers down a path of self-destruction?
This is what happened.
In the beginning, there were three: Eleanor, Justine, Rachelle.
Eleanor was studying Italian in the room next door at the university, on a Thursday night. I saw her and wanted her. She had long hair that was heavy and dark and looked as though it would feel silky if you touched it. I would go early to the class and hang around in the refectory first, hoping to see her. She was always alone. She didn’t sit with others, even the other people from her class. Sometimes she would arrive half an hour before the class started and sit in the refectory with her textbooks, reading through something in them, or looking over a printout of what was probably her latest assignment. I sat at the back and watched her: the way her shoulders hunched, the way she sat, her legs crossed at the ankle under the plastic chair.